What Should Investors Do if Insurance Prices Keep Rising?

We’re currently in a home insurance crisis. Everyone (except for Henry, apparently) is feeling the sting of home insurance prices rising significantly year after year. Some investors have seen their homes’ insurance costs double or triple over a few years. This is making it harder not only to protect your property but also to keep your cash flow. What do you do, and can anyone save us from this home insurance crisis?

Today, we’re discussing something too big to ignore: your home insurance bill. Premiums are rising fast across coastal states and are starting to creep inland. In this episode, we’re talking about why home insurance prices have gone up so much and so quickly, the state governments actively working to get premium prices down, and what investors MUST do now to limit the price hikes coming down the road.

We’re also exploring state-offered insurance programs that help homeowners whose policies have been dropped. Can the government come in and fix our insurance premium problems before it’s too late, or will rising prices lead to home price corrections as affordability suffers?

Dave:
Insurance premiums have risen 33% since the beginning of 2019, which is way faster than the rest of inflation. That is difficult for investors to deal with. But the question is, what happens if the cost of home insurance keeps climbing across the country over time? What would that mean for home values? And how should you as an investor protect your investments regardless of what happens today? We’re going to be digging into this topic. What’s up everyone? It’s Dave. Welcome to On the Market Today, I have Henry Washington and Kathy Fettke, who might be the least insurable person I know on the show today. True. Kathy, you live in a place that’s just like famously, no one wants to insure you, right?

Kathy:
Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s really been an issue the last few years. I live in southern California. There was a huge Malibu fire. Hundreds of homes were burned, and these were not low cost homes. So yes, we’ve seen insurance go up and many people get dropped. So this is a really important topic.

Dave:
Well, we’re going to dig into your plight more over the course of this

Kathy:
Show.

Dave:
Welcome, Henry. I actually was reading an article preparing for this, and it said that Arkansas is one of the better markets for insurance, so congratulations on that. You can contrast Kathy here today.

Henry:
We are seeing rates come up, but they’re up from what would be considerably low for California.

Dave:
All right. Well, I want to talk more about Arkansas later, but we’ll get into that in a little bit. The point of today’s episode is all about home insurance. If you haven’t heard, it’s been super volatile. It’s going up and it varies a lot state by state. We’re going to get into that as well. And we’ve seen the headlines of folks who have abruptly lost their insurance or had their costs skyrocket. I have a friend who actually had his primary triple in just two or three years, and these issues just used to not really exist that much as an investor. I don’t know if you guys agree, but I used to just not even think about insurance. It’s just something that went up like two or 3% every year, and then you just sign the check and that was it. And now it’s something we got to be talking about and thinking about all the time. So that’s what we’re going to do today, and Henry and Kathy are along for the ride. So let’s just start with you, Kathy, because we sort of alluded to this, but you’ve mentioned that you’ve been rejected for insurance, you’ve had a hard time getting insurance in the past. This is on your primary residence, right? It

Kathy:
Sure is, and I live in a fire zone, so this should not be shocking news to anyone that insurance is going up. Our home is more new, and so it hasn’t gone up as badly as other areas. Plus we’ve done the things that we’re required to do. In fact, when we got our certificate of occupancy on this house, they made us cut down all the trees. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, because they were actually typical of California. We were required to plant certain things and we did. And then when it came to co, we had to take it out because there were different departments. It was the fire department that required that. And then people said, please don’t plant any more trees because you technically could after you have your certificate of occupancy. But that is one of the things that keeps your insurance high. We also get checked every single year to make sure that we’ve cleared any brush that any weeds are picked, that there’s nothing dry around the house.
We planted basically agave plants, water resistant plants, all around the property. So these things help keep the insurance down. But with that said, there are limits. We are all on the California Fair Plan, which we’re going to talk about in a bit, what that means. No regular insurance company would insure us. We’re only on the state plan, which is the fair plan, and that has limits to how much it’ll cover. And as we’ll talk about in the article, it’s very unorganized because it’s grown so quickly because so many people are getting dropped that they’re all going to the California Fair Plan. There are 350,000 Californians on it now, so their systems are just overblown, can’t get through to anybody. They mix things up. We’ve gotten dropped even from that because they said we didn’t pay and we have to prove we did pay. Your records are wrong. So it’s a problem. That’s

Dave:
Why I’m saying you’re the least insurable person I know, but it sounds like this has been going on for a long time. It’s not super recent.

Kathy:
Well, as you probably recall, the Malibu fire and the Paradise Fire happened at the same time in 2018, and the Paradise Fire wiped out an entire town, and that’s where my parents used to live. It was just gone. You had to rebuild the whole town. And at the same time, Malibu had hundreds of homes disappear. And of course we’ve had the Napa fires and the Santa Rosa fires, and these were big, it’s like the Maui fire every year. And so of course there’s going to be consequences of that. And in another area, having a million dollar coverage might be okay, that’ll cover your house. But in California, a million dollars really doesn’t get you very much, so you wouldn’t have enough money to rebuild. So it is really a difficult situation.

Dave:
That’s a situation I’ve been running into as well, is where I can get coverage, but not for a replacement value that’s really going to do anything for me. Where it’s like, this is for a mountain property in Colorado, and they were like, the replacement costs, it’s a pretty luxurious place. It was like 92 bucks a square foot. I was like, where are you coming up with this? It would be at least $300 a square foot to rebuild this place. And so it just basically defeats the point of having insurance just paying a premium for something that’s not even going to help you that much in case of an emergency. So obviously there are a lot of challenges out here, and these are just two examples in two totally different states, but Henry, I’d love to hear your input on this because it sounds like Arkansas’s at least a little bit better.

Henry:
Yeah, insurance prices, like I said, they have gone up comparatively to the past two to three years, but not substantially. I mean 5% increase in insurance costs. It’s not crazy, but it is higher than before. And as we have been evaluating our portfolio recently in the past couple of months, we have seen that insurance costs are by far one of our largest costs in our business, in our portfolio. And so we are actively shopping our insurance policies and making sure that our policies are actually matching what we are doing to monetize the property, which I think a lot of people get stuck with. As an example, I might buy a property with the intent to fix and flip it. Well, that’s a different kind of coverage than I would need if I’m going to have a tenant in that property. And because the market has been so volatile, we’ve pivoted strategies on some properties and that has now forced us to go back and pivot insurance policies to make sure that we are covered given the new exit strategy that we have. But the costs have gone up a little bit. All we’re doing is really just adjusting our underwriting so that when we’re making offers on properties, we’re taking into consideration what those higher insurance costs are and then we’re making our offers with that in mind so that we are basically writing it into the offer we’re making on the property.

Dave:
So yeah, I mean it sounds like they’re going up similar to the pace of inflation, at least in Arkansas, whereas in other states like California, Florida, Louisiana, actually Illinois, which I was kind of surprised to see, they are going up way, way faster than the rate of inflation. Side note here, actually the way the government calculates inflation barely factors in insurance costs, which is a little bit crazy, but I think that’s sort of one of the big key differences here is yeah, everything’s gone up, but in certain states it’s really outsized.

Henry:
I mean, it’s one of the benefits to Arkansas being in the middle of the country. We don’t have the extreme weather as a lot of those coastal areas you were talking about, the biggest weather related insurance issues we have are flooding when we have really, really heavy torrential rains. Other than that, it’s just really hot here in the summer and that doesn’t really do anything for your insurance costs other than a bunch of HVACs going all that at the same time. So it

Dave:
Just makes you mad. Yeah,

Henry:
It just makes you upset. But we do have flooding issues and we do have to be very careful about when we’re insuring properties and making sure that it’s covered for flood insurance. That is something completely separate typically.

Dave:
And I do want to focus most of our conversation today about what investors should do. So I’m actually going to just quickly go some of the reasons, at least why experts cite that insurance prices have gone up. First and foremost is the most obvious is that home prices have gone up. And so the cost of replacement as of construction costs, so the cost of replacement, when something bad does happen and there actually is a loss, it’s way more expensive for the insurance company to replace that home. And so they pass that price along to the policy owner. There are increasing amounts of weather and climate related damage. We see every year it seems like the most expensive storm on record hits somewhere in the country. We’ve seen in Houston or in Florida or in Louisiana, these very expensive big disasters or fires in California or Colorado as well.
I’ve also seen that something was interesting when I was researching this, the rate of insurance fraud has actually gone up in a lot of states. And so the insurance companies have to compensate for that. And in just specifically in rural states, there are fewer homeowners to share the risk. And so the people who do have policies have to bear more of a cost for the risk of loss. So those were some of the common things. Alright, so that’s why insurance rates have gone up, but when we come back, we’ll talk about what you could do to navigate these costs as an investor plus a data point from Henry State that caught my eye and gave me some thoughts about how you can game the system a little bit. So stick around.
Hey everyone, welcome back to On the Market. Henry, I wanted to share with you, I was reading this article in the New York Times, it shared some research that some professors from, I think it was University of Pennsylvania and University of Wisconsin did. And they were showing how states and areas that have very similar climate risk have very, very different insurance premiums. And Arkansas was one of the examples. So they showed that in Buerten County, Oklahoma, the typical homeowner paid an average of $2,337 for insurance. But right across the state line, it’s on the border with Arkansas in Little River County, Arkansas, I don’t know where this is, but it’s just right across the border. So basically the same climate, right? Similar risk, $1,673. That’s a 40% difference in insurance costs just by going over the state line. So it feels like there is something other than just risks going up, going on here, clearly something on a state levels going on. These professors tend to believe that it’s due to different levels of regulation. Like Arkansas has some laws about how much you can raise premiums Oklahoma, and that’s why they’ve gone up so much. So you should take some solace, Henry, that somewhat in your state government is looking out for you.

Henry:
Hey man, Arkansas never lets me down as a landlord friendly state.

Kathy:
I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but we were doing, looking at fourplexes just over the border of Texas and Oklahoma and those fourplexes had really low insurance and I thought that was strange. Every state’s got their issues and obviously in Oklahoma it’s tornadoes, but for some reason just over the border in this particular area, it was more hilly and it was harder for the tornadoes to really take flight in those areas. So I wonder if that has anything to do with it in this case.

Dave:
Interesting. That’s very interesting. Well, we are talking here about what investors can do about this if insurance premiums keep going up. And so what I learned from this article is that you should very much be in tune with what is going on in your local area with insurance policy, not just the policies that you could buy, but government policy around insurance. And we’ll get into that more. But what this article was saying is that in Oklahoma, I’m just picking on Oklahoma, but in Oklahoma, the regulating office, whatever they’re called there, has never once exercised its right to limit premium increases. Never. Whereas if you look in states like Florida where they know this is obviously a really big problem, their government is getting more involved in trying to figure out a solution with private companies. So this is just something as an investor you can do proactively. You probably can’t control it, but at least you understand what’s going on in your market so that you could at least forecast a little bit about where premiums might go.

Henry:
I think what investors need to do in terms of insurance is the same thing that we do in terms of lending or other areas of investment that are more on the forefront of our mind. It’s that we leverage relationships in order to understand how to navigate these waters. And you’re right, insurance has always been one of those things where it’s like, alright, get a policy and let’s move on, right? Because typically it’s been affordable, you understand it, it’s underwritten into your deal. But now as weather is more extreme in certain areas of the country, we just had a tornado here in my local market and I had to file three different insurance claims and fortunately enough, all of them were covered. But what it did was force us to go sit down and have a conversation with our insurance broker. And when we had that conversation, we were able to look at our entire portfolio and make sure that we were covered both for the exit strategy that we have and for anything that they are seeing on the horizon because they are involved in the insurance industry, they understand what’s happening in changes in policy and different companies.
And so they were able to make some recommendations for us to make some changes on insurance policies and insurance coverages to better protect us and to save us money. And that’s not something we did prior to this year because it was just like you said, Dave, it was just what it was. Get a policy and move on. And I think that especially in the more coastal states where the weather can be more extreme, you really have to be a little more proactive about your approach with insurance and having those conversations so you understand what it’s truly going to cost you and you truly understand what is and isn’t covered. Because sometimes what you think you may be covered for you are absolutely not covered for, I just tore a house from a guy who had tornado damage. His whole bottom floor flooded because of the tornado. The tornado caused rain, the rain filled up the area behind his house and then that water came into his house and technically they did not cover the tornado damage. They said it was flood damage and that it didn’t have flood insurance. And yikes, if you’re in one of these more at risk markets, you’ve got to understand insurance more and you have to understand what you’re covered for, what you’re not covered for and what risk you have out there when you’re buying property in these areas.

Kathy:
Oh my gosh, I cannot emphasize the importance of that enough. Most people have no idea what they’re covered for. If they’re landlords, if they have the proper landlord insurance, this is a major problem. Most people don’t even have their policy. They’ve never asked for it. So make sure you’ve got that in front of you and if you don’t understand it, get someone to help you. Who does? There are nonprofit groups to help you with that. One of the big things is called named storm insurance. We had an investor at Real Wealth come to us and say, we weren’t covered for this major storm in Houston, and they said something about a named storm. If a storm has a name and you don’t have coverage for it, you don’t get covered. Wait,

Dave:
The stupid names, they come up with storms actually impacts your coverage.

Kathy:
Yeah, talk to your insurance agent and there’s a chance they might not even know what this is because just like you, they’d be like, what? But this is extremely important. Yes. If you live in a named storm area, which is basically Florida and Texas that I know of, maybe Louisiana. Louisiana. Yeah, ask about that. You

Dave:
Know what? I’m just going to say this sucks. I as a beginning investor, I just decided I didn’t want to learn about taxes. It was too boring that eventually bit me in the, and so I learned about taxes, but I’ve been holding out for 15 years not learning about insurance and now

Henry:
No longer my friend,

Dave:
I have to do it and I don’t want to, I really don’t. Don’t want to read the policies. I don’t want to do any of this, but we definitely should.

Kathy:
You’re not alone. I mean who does, even if you read it, could you really understand it? And the answer is no. No. So you have to have an advocate for you. And in California, again, because it’s California, there are nonprofits to help homeowners understand their insurance policy because it matters. You may not even know what you have to come out of pocket. Or in our case, during the Malibu fire, we had some trees burn, no big deal. We didn’t even have smoke damage. And the next day there were insurance companies walking, I’m not kidding, coming down the street, not the next day we were evacuated, but in the next month they were coming down the street with checks and most people accepted it. So we did. It was like, oh, a check. We get to fix our backyard. It was no big deal. But guess what that does? When you accept money raises your premium, your insurance policy goes up. And it was something we really didn’t even need. But who’s going to say no, right? Money. This

Dave:
Is what they do in Malibu, Henry, they just walk around down the streets and just hand out money to people. They’re like, I knew it lost money.

Kathy:
They’re hoping that will be enough, like you say, thanks, but for people who had smoke damage, you could get much more. Again, in our case, it would’ve been much better to not take that $20,000 check and not have our insurance go up, but it probably would’ve gone up anyway.

Dave:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. It probably would have. Yeah. Alright, so I want to turn to the question of what happens from here, and I have two main questions. The first is, do you think that higher insurance premiums will have an adverse effect on home prices in areas like Florida? And I’ll give an example, this is not like a causal relationship. You can’t say because insurance premiums are going up, Florida’s having one of the biggest corrections in the country. But both of those things are true. Florida’s insurance premiums have gone up and we’re starting to see a pullback in the Florida market. Florida is still way, way, way higher than it was in 2019. So don’t take that all with a grain of salt, but I’m just curious what you guys think of that. Do you think there’s a connection there? And Henry, I’ll start with you.

Henry:
I’m going to give the political answer. Is there a connection? Yeah, there’s probably a connection, but I don’t think because the insurance premiums are the way they are, that everyone’s just going to leave Florida and then that’s going to create this oversupply of housing and people don’t want to live there because of insurance. I just don’t see that. So people who want to live there and can afford to live there and afford to pay for the premiums will pay for it. And sure, that might have an effect on real estate prices a little bit. If there is more supply and less demand, prices should come down a little bit, but I don’t see it being this 20, 30% drop in housing prices because insurance premiums have gone up so much. I can’t see some mass exodus of people out of Florida because of it.

Dave:
No, I personally don’t think so either. I think it’s more like, Hey, insurance went up five grand a year. What is the corresponding correction in home prices that makes the monthly payment escrow payment the same? Essentially? That’s definitely not 10 or 20%. It might be 2%. I don’t know exactly what it is. I don’t know the math, but that’s sort of more what I was thinking. Kathy, what are your thoughts on this?

Kathy:
The cost of living is really important. People follow where they can live better and businesses too. But one of the reasons people move to Florida is there is a huge cost savings in overall tax if there’s no state income tax. So if you balance that out, where else are they going to go and get a good deal? They could go to Texas, no estate income tax, but boy, you’re going to pay property tax. So it just all comes down to affordability of your lifestyle, not just your housing payment, not just your insurance, how it all adds up. But in Florida, yeah, people will leave. There’ll be people that leave that say, this is too expensive, I need to go somewhere cheaper. But they also might look at Florida and say, maybe I just moved to another part of Florida that’s less expensive or a different product.
For example, we did a lot, our business model up until 2018 was buying older homes, fixing them up, basically the bur model or turnkey properties where a team would do that for you. They’d buy the old house, fix it up, and you’d be getting a deal. Well, today it’s not the deal because the older homes have so much higher insurance, it went from about 1500 a year to like 4,000. So that really affects your cashflow. However, on a newer home, it’s like half that. It’s still pretty cheap because you’ve got, let’s see, cinder block constructions, slab foundations, reinforced roofs, windows, everything’s built to a different standard when it’s new and insurance companies recognize that. So it could be that people just maybe move into newer product or they move into parts of Florida that are less affected, which would be more central. Florida obviously Miami, Sarasota, we saw anything coastal is expensive and especially if it’s an older home, it just can’t withstand the hurricane winds.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I also want to just call out though, we’re beating up on Florida a little bit here on California, but it’s not just coastal states. We’ve seen huge increases in, I mentioned Illinois, Maine. Well, Maine is coastal but doesn’t have the same hurricane.

Henry:
Illinois coastal too. That’s a big lake.

Dave:
Yeah, there’s a big lake with no waves on it, but there’s a lot of snow around there. Okay, time for one last quick break. When we come back, things get a little spicy as we talk about how the government might need to step into the insurance market right after this.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. The reality is, as of right now, a lot of insurance companies are just pulling out of states. They’re offering less different policies or they’re being much more restrictive on what types of properties that they will insure. And my mind when I hear this stuff is that the government is going to have to step in. Yes. And before you have a reaction to that, the government steps into the situation, you should know that this is very common and already exists. Right. Kathy mentioned it earlier. There’s something called the fair access to insurance requirements. It’s property insurance sponsored by states. I think it’s something like 32 different states already offer this. So Florida has one. Kathy mentioned that she has one. There are New York, Hawaii, North Carolina. So this is not something that doesn’t exist. But from what Kathy said and from what I’ve read about Florida’s state sponsored program is that it’s just inadequate. Is that your experience, Kathy?

Kathy:
The black suits are listening. Again, it’s growing so fast because everybody’s getting dropped, so they’re going to the California fair plan and they’re overwhelmed. It is inadequate right now. Then I just heard that it’s sort of first come, first serve. There’s not enough money to cover everybody. Interesting. Yeah. It’s like, well, how do you be first? It is a really scary situation, and it is the first time for the first time I’ve considered moving out because I love it here. I love where I live. It would be hard to leave, but at some point, I just said earlier, the cost of living is what drives people to live where they live. And if it’s just too risky, if I couldn’t rebuild my house, but I’m still paying my mortgage payment and my insurance that I’ve been paying ridiculous amounts on, it has gone up. It’s high even on the fair plan, but then I don’t get the coverage. It’s scary, Kathy.

Dave:
Don’t worry, they’re just going to walk down your street and hand you money. It’s just what happens now. But

Kathy:
My husband who somehow thinks I like my house more than him, he’s like, I’m going to stay and fight the fire and no, I kind of need you.

Dave:
I’ve told you that in the past. If it’s wildfire, V Rich, Kathy’s husband, I’m picking rich. I think he’s got it. If you know Rich, he would win that fight.

Kathy:
He’s going to get an oxygen tank. He’s got a hose. But I’ll tell you, people do. People who live in Malibu, and I don’t know about other places, they stay and they try to fight it because they say it’s the embers, the small ones, that little embers that really cause the problems. I mean, I think it’s the fire that causes the problems. But anyway, if you stay in your pool, you will die unless you have an oxygen tank and families have done it or they jump in the ocean, they think I’m going to be okay. It’s not like that. You can’t breathe. It’s so bad. So get an oxygen tank. If you’re going to be like my husband,

Dave:
I’m not recommending that to anyone. If there’s a fire in your area, get the hell out of there. Just go, please follow the evacuation orders. Leave it

Kathy:
To the professional.

Dave:
I wanted to bring it up because I think the reason that a lot of these state insurers are seen as inadequate is because they’re not designed to be primary insurance. They are designed to be what is known as an insurer of last resort and basically serve a purpose of filling a void in the private market where for I would say state specific challenges. So in Florida there are the state insurance there, it’s designed to help people with flood insurance or with hurricane insurance. In California, it’s wildfires in Oklahoma or in the Midwest. I’m sure it’s for tornadoes and it’s supposed to be supplementary insurance on top of your primary homeowner insurance policy. But what seems to be happening is that people are just getting dropped in a lot of these places from primary insurance. And so they’re going to the state and being like, I just need any insurance. And they’re just not set up to do that. And so I keep thinking that states are going to have to figure out a way to make their insurance policies more robust. But you know what that means? Probably higher property taxes or other taxes because the most state governments aren’t just flush with cash. They’re going to have to raise that money somewhere to help support homeowners. Yeah,

Henry:
I think all this just plays into the affordability issue. And I don’t want to say this is goodness, but if you are listening to this show and you hadn’t heard about this before, now you have some information to help you make a more informed decision before you go buy something and then get surprised. But there are a good subset of people in the first time home buyer category who bought a home with a high interest rate and then now after a year or two of ownership have been hit with new insurance costs and are not able to afford the new mortgages, and these people are selling their properties because they can no longer afford. And so I do think that something is going to have to happen so that people can continue to afford homes. Because if you’re in that subset and say you were paying the story I read, there was a young lady paying about, I think it was 14 to 1500 bucks a month, and that was about all she could afford. And then insurance and taxes both went up on her and she ended up paying close to like $2,100 a month. That’s a really big shift. If you’re a first time home buyer, those things are killing people when they’re trying to afford the American dream.

Dave:
We had an expert from ice, it’s a mortgage data company, come on a couple of months ago, and he was talking about how in Louisiana, the insurance and taxes are now equal to principal and interest on a lot of mortgages. And just if you guys don’t understand that when you make a mortgage payment every month, most people, everyone who has a traditional mortgage, not an interest only pays principle that’s paying back the bank. You have interest that’s the bank’s profit. So some people just pay p and i, but most people wrap their taxes and insurance in their mortgage payment and an escrow payment. And typically the principal insurance, I don’t know about you guys, what 75, 80% of the payment is usually something like that, but now it’s like 50 50 and it’s not because principal and interest went down, it’s because taxes and insurance are up.
And it’s almost like paying two mortgages now in Louisiana specifically. And the reason I just think the government’s going to step in is this is going to be a political issue. This is really impacting not investors. I mean it is impacting investors, but this is just ordinary folks are going to be dealing with this and 66% on the country owns their own home. So it’s like two thirds of people are going to be pretty frustrated with this and trying to find a solution. And I would be pretty shocked. And insurance is really handled on a state basis that if this isn’t on the ballot in most states going forward, trying to find creative solutions to this problem.

Kathy:
Yeah, I mean in one of these articles that you sent over Dave, in preparation for this, it basically said that if it continues at a loss or even break even insurance companies aren’t coming back. They’re not in the business to break even or lose money, but maybe the government is so sounds, I don’t understand it well enough, but it sounded like the fair plan isn’t actually government money, it’s insurance companies still involved in that, but we’d have to bring on someone from the fair plan to really explain that they’re somehow still involved and maybe they’re pooling money or something. But now I’m just making stuff up.

Dave:
So Henry, what should people be focused on in terms of how to deal with this situation?

Henry:
I mean, I think the answer to that question is insurance. I think the problem is we weren’t really focused on it before because it was so easy to get, you were going to get coverage, it was typically going to be affordable. And now that’s not the case. So we have to treat it. We treat other aspects from an investor standpoint. Guys, we have to treat it like we treat other aspects of our investing business. We shop around lenders to find the best interest rates and terms. We shop around for properties that give us the best price points and we ask for concessions and all these things. We’re doing everything that we can to maximize our expenses and increase our profits relation to everything else in the underwriting process. And insurance is kind that last thing that we now cannot just set it and forget it any longer. We have to be more proactive as investors in understanding where you live, what weather implications, impact insurance, where is your property located? Does the insurance company think that your property is in a more high risk area? You just have to be a little more educated about what insurance is in your area, how much it costs, and what you can do to maybe make some adjustments. And I

Kathy:
Would like to redeem myself. You guys go for it. I looked it up. This is how easy it is to get information these days says contrary to popular belief that California Fair Plan is not a government backed program. It is financially supported by California’s private home insurance companies, not taxpayers. Interesting. The recent turmoil in the California home insurance market has left the fair plan, overburdened, strained, and increasingly expensive as of June of this year. The California Fair Plan has around 408,000 policies, an increase of 164% since 2019. So it is my understanding that it was kind of mandated like, Hey, if you want to ensure our state, you have to also be a part of this. But at some point, when does it become like, Hey, we don’t want anything to do with California. We’re pulling out for sure if we have to be a part of this because it is growing so fast.

Dave:
Well, this has been a lot of fun. Great conversation about a topic that no one wishes they had to pay attention to, let’s be honest. But this is why we’re here talking about what’s going on, what’s changing in the real estate market, and this is something that we’re all going to have to become at least proficient in, at least literate in the next couple of years. Henry and Kathy, thank you so much. We will of course, put their contact information in the show notes so you can find them on the BiggerPockets website for BiggerPockets. I’m Dave Meyer and we’ll see you back on the market in just a couple of days. On the market was created by me, Dave Meyer and Kaylin Bennett. The show is produced by Kaylin Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting is by Calico content, and we want to extend a big thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for making this show possible.

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.